Charitable trusts

Your support through a charitable trust is essential to us; without it, our influential and life-saving portfolio of research into breast cancer would not exist.

Thank you very much indeed if you are a representative of a trust that supports us and welcome if this is your first contact with us.

Our current funders and work

A key partner in our progress is the Mary-Jean Mitchell Green Foundation, who have donated over £4.7 million towards our work and were one of the inaugural funders of the UK’s first dedicated breast cancer research centre.

Mary-Jean Mitchell Green, a successful business woman with a young family, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1987. Following treatment, her disease went into remission, only to return a year later as a particularly aggressive form. As a testament to her strength and generosity of spirit she created a foundation to fund research into a cure for breast cancer. She died in 1990, aged just 38, leaving behind her husband Peter and her sons Alexander and Andrew.

The Breast Cancer Now Toby Robins Research Centre at the Institute of Cancer Research opened in 1999, and was made possible by the Mary-Jean Mitchell Green Foundation. The Centre is housed in the Mary-Jean Mitchell Green Building, named in her memory, and our work is inspired every day by her warmth and grace in the face of uncertainty.

We are incredibly grateful to the Foundation and the Green family for their continued support of our work, and for sharing our goal that by 2050, everyone who develops breast cancer will live – and live well.

The fact that more women are surviving breast cancer than ever before is in large part down to the Mary-Jean Mitchell Green Foundation, and enabling loved and needed women to spend more time with their families is a fitting tribute to Mary-Jean herself.

We are also grateful to the Haley Family Charitable Trust and the Fidelity UK Foundation for providing significant contributions to our world-class work.

Our research

Our research strategy is based on independent gap analyses of the unanswered research questions that have the potential to bring the greatest benefit to people with breast cancer.

We have four priority areas which are crucial to improving survival rates and making progress towards our 2050 goal:

Risk and prevention - we need a better understanding of who is most at risk and how to prevent breast cancer developing

Secondary breast cancer - breast cancer that has spread to other parts of the body, is known as 'secondary breast cancer' and it is the main reason that around 11,500 women and 80 men die from breast cancer every year – that’s nearly 1,000 deaths each month. We are determined to stop women dying of breast cancer.